Providing Water, Sustaining Life

Yale Public Health Magazine, Spring 2016, Alumni Spotlight, p. 36-39. Read the full article here

The Spring 2016 edition of the Yale Public Health Magazine spotlights Yale alumni Ariane Kirtley, Amman Imman's founder and director. Ariane earned a bachelors degree in anthropology at Yale and an M.P.H. at the Yale School of Public Health in 2004. She first visited the Azawak as a Fulbright scholar in 2005, and went on to establish Amman Imman: Water is Life in 2006.  

From the article:

Ariane Kirtley grew up in remote villages across West Africa, including the Republic of Niger. The French-American daughter of National Geographic photojournalists, she bonded completely with the people in her villages.  

"I didn't have any friends who weren't African so to me, I was African," she said. Her unusual childhood included a best friend, Julia, a gorilla that was being rehabilitated in Gambia to be returned to the wild. It was only when Kirtley grew older that she recognized the many needs and challenges her African “family” faced, and she decided, “I wanted to grow up and help the people who had helped raise me.”

Read the full article, pages 36-39, here.